SOURCE: Brent, Frances Padorr. “Seeing the ‘Debased Imagination’ That Shapes History.” Chicago Tribune Books (20 December 1992): 3.

In the following review of Black Dogs, Brent commends McEwan's unsettling depiction of domestic violence, but finds his political commentary lifeless.

As we approach the year 2000, it is not surprising to find a number of American and European novelists evoking apocalyptic imagery in order to express the conflicting forces of a receding century.

British novelist Ian McEwan has summoned the images of wild dogs [in Black Dogs], with their age-old association to the vengeance of the Lord, to examine the way that history and the imagination are intertwined. The epigraph to the novel comes from the words of the Renaissance Platonist, Marsilio Ficino: “In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.”

The “black dogs...